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Category Archives: Fictions

Answerphone

That message that you never left… I just got it.

Opening line of great novel noir

The Englishman is not English. But that is a detail.

1826 – a Werner Herzog movie pitch*

I Port Natal, New Year. Bare-chested natives dance under the unfinished walls of Fort Farewell. Many cattle are eaten. II Port Natal, February. Short of livestock, the white settlers plan an expedition inland, to Shaka’s kraal. They hack the figurehead from their wrecked ship, the Mary, as a gift for the black Napoleon. III The interior (Independent […]

Newsnight, summarised

‘With respect: you’re an idiot.’

Other ways of seeing

An A-W of (alternative) artistic terminology   Arte Povera – affordable art Brücke, die – German successors to the Fauvists (later disbanded amid accusations of Fauvoritism) colour – the new ‘black’ deconstruction – critic’s hatchet-job Edvard Munch – AaaaaaaaAAAAARRRGHH!! Freud – act of ripping people off Gauguin – one employed in knocking out Tahitian pearl […]

Graphology (preliminary results)

Man A has the handwriting of an intellectual. Which is to say ‘of a child’. (Which is to say ‘of a child intellectual’. Not ‘an intellectual child’.)

If your love were true…

I can’t help but feel that at some point in the last two years you’d have learned how to use the conditional tense.

Interview(ed)

(for the British School in Colombo yearbook 2010/11) 1. So, what’s with the beard? After I graduated from the War Studies Faculty at KCL I rather fancied myself as a war correspondent, so I grew the beard. Then I just rather fancied myself. 2. We somehow get the impression that you are always very sarcastic […]

Was ist Lydia? (homage)

I  If only I’d been born Lydia Davis I’d have written a lot less.   II  The Lydia Davis School of Banter – Call me, bitch. – Don’t call me bitch.   III  Flaubert, revised ‘“A good sentence in prose,” says Flaubert, “should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”’ […]

Domestic

– Nothing’s ever perfect enough for you, is it? – ‘Perfect enough‘?